Gilliamesque

by Terry Gilliam

  There’s no business like snow business.

  or the first few weeks after I got back from Paris in early 1966, Harvey Kurtzman kindly put me up in his Mount Vernon attic. I think he and his wife Adele were quite intrigued by the little rat’s nest I made up there with all the exotic fabrics I’d brought back from my travels in Istanbul and North Africa. I love handmade carpets – there’s something about the process of weaving that I find immensely fascinating – and the Islamic tradition whereby they always leave a deliberate flaw in the rug because only God can make something perfect also really speaks to me. I’ve certainly tried to stay true to that principle in my own work.

  Adding to the textural smörgåsbord on offer in my temporary home was the Turkish coat of destiny – yet to acquire the painted sun on the back, which would ultimately catch fire in the jealous imaginings of my Monty Python colleagues – and a ratty fox-fur lining for some other garment I’d hauled back with me, which I’d taken to wearing as a stand-alone wrap. By the time my ahead-of-its-time wardrobe of ethnic carpet samples had seen me through the last cold days of winter 1966, I’d confirmed that for me living in New York now fell into the been-there-done-that category.

  Looking back, I think my decision to move back out west to LA wasn’t so much about heading home as clearing the decks – checking out what America still had to offer me – because I’d been so fascinated by Europe that there was definitely unfinished business for me on the other side of the Atlantic. As it turned out, with my customary Zelig-like (or should that be Forrest Gumpish?) subliminal acuity, I’d picked a great time to be moving to the West Coast, although in the end even the noisy counter-cultural climax of 1966–7 would not be enough to drown out London’s siren lure.

  In the meantime, Hollywood was definitely a factor as far as my going back to Los Angeles was concerned. A girl who’d worked with me throughout the death throes of Help! had got married and moved out there to work in films, and she introduced me to the great Ealing director Alexander ‘Sandy’ Mackendrick, as there was some possibility of me getting an acting job in what turned out to be his final film, Don’t Make Waves. Somewhat to my shame, the fact that Tony Curtis was going to be in the movie was far more impressive to me than Mackendrick’s amazing pedigree as the man who gave us The Ladykillers and Sweet Smell of Success – it’s always been like that with me and directors, the things they’ve done never connect up as tidily in my mind as an actor’s body of work.

  Like thousands of other young Americans, I was letting my hair grow longer at the time – prompted, inevitably, by The Beatles. Joanne Crump, a friend from Oxy, had done the honours for me the last time I’d had a trim, using the cover of Rubber Soul as a reference. After spending so much of my life with a crew cut – which it turned out was what the role in the film demanded – I, sadly, had to say no to the part to preserve my new-found à la mode-ness.

  My refusal to make this modest tonsorial sacrifice can probably be taken as an index of my lack of commitment to a possible new career as an actor. But in the increasingly polarised atmosphere of mid-1960s America, small personal decisions such as whether to wear your hair short or long had started to have major ideological significance.

  There was a weird line drawn in the sand at around this time – which wasn’t just about the length of your hair, but also about the way it was cut – and there was no option but to choose a side. With the Vietnam War on the right and John Lennon on the left, I was never in any doubt about where my loyalties lay. And the sense of security and freedom that I’d enjoyed in Europe (and especially England) rapidly gave way to a high probability of being vilified on the streets of Los Angeles as a harbinger of drug-addled revolution and a betrayer of American values.

  Luckily for me, it turned out that if you moved in the right circles, having hair like a girl’s could actually enhance your employment prospects, as well as throttling your nascent career as a matinée idol while it was still in its foetal stage. On first moving to LA, I’d done bits and bobs of freelance artwork – carrying on cartooning for various magazines, while working on an illustrated book called The Cocktail People with my friend Joel Siegel. Then, when Joel got a job at a big advertising agency called Carson/Roberts, he took me in with him for an interview. There was a creative executive, Ken Sullet, there who’d worked with the great parodist Stan Freberg on his ground-breaking early sixties comedy album The United States of America, Vol. 1, so that really impressed me. The good vibrations were mutual. It turned out they had a vacancy for a token long-hair – as so many American media companies did at the time – and I fitted the bill nicely, so they hired me as Joel’s visual accompanist.

  I’d not been back on the West Coast long before I found myself that little house on stilts up in Laurel Canyon – an address which had yet to become the shorthand for gracious rock-star living that Joni Mitchell et al would turn it into. At this stage it was just a little place in the hills where a bunch of hippies hung out – the closest you could get to living in the country while still being effectively in the middle of LA. It was great up there, though. You’d walk outside in the morning and the air would be lovely and clear. Then you’d look down the road and there would be some girl in a white shift, dancing in the dew, and you’d think, ‘Fuck! This is magical – Camelot may be dead, but the faerie kingdom lives on.’

  That wasn’t the only echo of the past that would be my future. I also attended the first Renaissance Fair, where people were wearing crushed velvet and mead was being drunk and it was all very medieval (basically it was Jabberwocky waiting to happen). Obviously mead was not the only mind-expanding substance that was freely available in the LA of 1966–7. I once picked up this beautiful girl hitch-hiking, who I impulsively decided to stay with in Laurel Canyon for a while. She turned out to be a complete acid-freak – when I asked her why she was looking so intently off to one side, she just said, ‘Oh, that tree flew away.’

  I used this sign to mark out my own bit of territory at carson/Roberts – not only was this strategy more civilised than the way a wolf would do it, it also allowed me to demonstrate the very av fait-ness with 1960s popular culture that had made me such a shrewd appointment.

  Other people at the agency were trying LSD, and a lot of them seemed to be having really bad trips and getting quite seriously fucked up, so I decided to give it a miss. I think being a few years older than many of those around me (most of whom seemed to be in their early twenties) probably helped keep me on the relatively straight and narrow (or as close as my mind has ever got to that).

  I think this one was Joel’s idea

  I’d always been quite good at resisting peer pressure, and this propensity would serve me just as well once I was on the receiving end of the blandishments of Hollywood as it did during my (relatively) abstemious 1960s. These two strands of self-disciplinary DNA had in fact been woven together as early as my teenage years, when I would shock high school classmates with my disdain for drive-ins. There are plenty of places you can drive the car to if you want to make out . . . if you’re going to watch a film, then watch the film. (I know what you’re thinking: ‘What were those crazy Presbyterians thinking, giving this guy a missionary scholarship?’)

  Cars have always been synonymous with freedom in America – environmental consequences notwithstanding – and a steady income from Carson/Roberts enabled me to channel my burgeoning Anglophilia into the purchase of a secondhand Hillman Minx convertible. It wasn’t long before the opportunity arose to give vent to that Anglophilia in a less mechanical context. While working at the agency, I kept hearing about this Cambridge-educated English journalist called Glenys Roberts, who was kind of legendary for being hot and smart. One weekend, my friend Chuck Alverson and his buddy from the Wall Street Journal asked me to join them on a trip to Tijuana, where Chuck was doing a piece on bull-fighting, and it didn’t take long after the latter’s girlfriend joined us for me to realise that she was the woman I’d been hearing about.

  This was a trip
that was full of signs and portents. First off, one of the bull-fighters was the legendary El Cordobés, a man to whom I’d been told by many people I bore a striking resemblance. My European travels had taken me to Granada on a weekend he was fighting there, and I was constantly being stopped in the streets by people who thought I was him. Now I’d finally caught up with the great man in Tijuana, he certainly wasn’t a disappointment. At one point, a bull leapt the barrier the toreros hide behind and somehow got stuck upside down. No one seemed to be able to shift it until El Cordobés leapt in, grabbed the bull by the tail (rather than the horns) and somehow hoisted it out.

  Later on, in another fight, one of the picadors’ horses got its guts ripped out and someone had to run over with a bit of corrugated cardboard to cover the mess. Then the mules who were there to pull the dead bull out of the ring refused to go through the gates. It was all getting increasingly strange and gruesome, as a dark and portentous cloud seem to hover lower and lower over the bullring, and everyone seemed to be going slightly mad. All the while I was sitting next to Glenys, clutching her closer and closer. Perhaps she was subliminally seduced by my alleged resemblance to the star of the show (El Cordobés, not the bull), but whatever the reason, in the course of that bullfight, the man from the Wall Street Journal was effectively usurped . . . not immediately, but with fairly instantaneous effect.

  El Cordobes – can’t see the likeness myself.

  Within a month or so, she had moved in with me in Laurel Canyon, forcing out my room-mate, Mike Drazen. Glenys had previously had a fling with Danny Kaye, so she already knew of my friend Dena. It’s funny how certain names keep cropping up at different stages of your life for apparently random reasons. Our next-door neighbours in Laurel Canyon were my old Woody Allen facilitator Judy Henske and her husband Jerry Yester (who was in a band called The Association and had once been asked to be in The Monkees). Across the way lived the charming and erudite Derek Taylor, who was the PR man for The Beatles, and later became a great friend of mine when I was working with George Harrison at HandMade Films.

  My first desk, which was positioned in an aisle at Carson/Roberts, had just been vacated by Gayle Hunnicutt, a Texan beauty who quickly became a well-known actress, eventually marrying David Hemmings, moving to England, kids, divorce, marriage to columnist supreme Simon Jenkins, and then . . . And then . . .

  All of which probably makes me look like a chronic name-dropper, but I never deliberately sought anyone out for that reason. It was just a matter of the people you bumped into along the way and ended up getting on well with. It was the same with places – I never thought, ‘It’s all happening in New York/LA/London . . . I should go’, there was always a specific reason for me to need to be wherever I was, and it was only then that good luck kicked in.

  One of the most exciting aspects of that time was that no one really seemed to know who anyone was going to end up being, let alone where the next happening destination was to be found. Accompanying Glenys on journalistic assignments as a semi-official press photographer, I found myself in all sorts of interesting situations.

  I remember one piece she wrote for Los Angeles magazine about all the artists and musicians living in the various LA canyons – ‘When the surly smog lies low over . . . Los Angeles, the canyon dwellers stay at home and smile.’ In retrospect, it might have been in our best interests as local residents to keep quiet about that, but either way, one of the canyon dwellers I was commissioned to photograph was a charming hirsute provocateur called Frank Zappa, whose wife and kids I later got to know quite well, after Frank’s sadly premature death.

  Not all my chance meetings of that era went quite so smoothly. One of the biggest accounts Carson/Roberts worked on was the toy makers Mattel, and I was deputised to deal with Kenny Handler – the son of the owners of the company, upon whom the original Ken doll was modelled (his sister Barbara was the template for Barbie). I’d been a little surprised to be asked round to the house in the evening to discuss whatever project he had in mind, but when he informed me that his wife was ‘out for the evening’, he did so in such a way as to leave me in no doubt that Carson/Roberts had stitched me up – I was to be the token sacrifice.

  For some reason Glenys and I turned up at the studio round the corner from Sunset Boulevard just as Frank and his Mothers needed some extra voices for a party sequence, so we ended up being on Freak Out! and Absolutely Free.

  I was often told that I had a certain appeal for those who were ‘batting for the other side’, and to be honest I didn’t really know how to deal with it. The first stirrings of gay pride might have been being felt in San Francisco and New York by that time, but homosexuality was still seen – by me, if not by everyone – as quite an alien and threatening phenomenon. I realise that must seem a bit naive for a man on the cusp of his late twenties, but I think I’d probably lived a rather more sheltered life than I liked to admit. People would talk about jerking each other off when they were growing up as if that was something everyone did, but I would have no such memories to contribute to the group discussion. And even on the odd occasion when participation in heterosexual orgies had been arranged, my timid participation had been far from that of the fearless libertine I fondly fancied myself to be.

  Kenny was subject to no such inhibitions. At the time, he was using the family fortune to try to build himself a cutting-edge impresario persona – based on the rather more illustrious examples of Brian Epstein and Andrew Loog Oldham – and he gaily regaled me with tales of how he, the Handler, handled his various dubious musical protegés. I remember there was one band called The Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, who were inexplicably failing to make it until Kenny told them to go out onstage wearing no underwear. From that point on, their household-name status was assured. Still more memorably, the Ken doll went on to become the popular gay icon it still is today.

  I had a fair number of wild schemes of my own at this time, which failed to quite get off the ground, including a sequence of still-born illustrated book projects for the publishers of The Cocktail People (which made Joel and me all of $12, each!), an unfeasible nightclub venture, and perhaps most ignominious of all, a children’s TV show called WC Clown. This was a joint advance on what we vainly hoped might be the soft underbelly of children’s TV by Siegel, myself and our mutual friend Irv Sepkowitz (who did eventually become a successful TV executive, helping negotiate Larry Hagman’s contract to stay on in Dallas after the ‘Who Shot J R?’ cliff-hanger), built around a character shamelessly based on the great W C Fields.

  In our pitch document, we cockily took down what we perceived to be one of our main rivals by asking, ‘Who needs Sesame Street?’ The answer to that question turned out to be ‘everyone does’. I never mentioned this to Jim Henson when we became friends in England, years later. He reciprocally neglected to inform me that he was a Christian Scientist. He’d probably still be with us if he hadn’t been, because he didn’t get down to the hospital when he should’ve because his faith forbade it.

  New showbiz gods were coming along at an amazing rate at this point in history, although music was as yet far ahead of film as a harbinger of the flower-power zeitgeist – I still had to get myself a second-hand tux from somewhere down on Melrose Avenue in order to attend my first Academy Awards as a photographer with Glenys representing the London Evening Standard (it was an old 1930s one in which I did look pretty snappy, though I say so myself). The dress code would be very different for the Monterey Pop Festival, which my Laurel Canyon neighbour Derek Taylor helped organise in the summer of 1967.

  The first great outdoor rock festival had all of the good things you’d expect of such a momentous event and very few of the negative associations of mud and murder which would later accrue (respectively) to Woodstock and Altamont. I definitely picked the right one of those three gigs to have a photographer’s pass for. Two of my most vivid memories of Monterey are of seeing Tiny Tim drifting around ethereally and of being stunned by the sheer androgynous decadence of Bri
an Jones and Nico, who were parked in the VIP section in matching antique lace. For a fabric enthusiast like myself, the impact made by that glamorous and diversely doomed pairing was probably as much of a revelation as any of the amazing music I heard that weekend.

  Monterey Pop stars – Jimi Hendrix, Ravi Shankar, The Monkees’ Micky Dolenz and Big Brother & The Holding Company with an as-yet unsigned Jains Joplin.

  If the crowd is going one way, my instincts have always tended to be to go in the other, but as far as the rapidly coalescing sixties counter-culture was concerned, I wasn’t so much going in the opposite direction as standing still while everyone else moved. In the increasingly self-satisfied aftermath of Monterey, I did start to wonder if some people were maybe losing the impulse to think for themselves a bit, and just being swept along by the wave.

  On the one hand, I was thrilled by the ensuing chaos – it was fantastic to see all the changes that were happening and the way society was opening up. On the other, in any kind of situation which is in a state of flux, there will always be those who are taking full advantage, whatever form such predation might take – from drug-dealing to more legal but no less pernicious forms of exploitation – so that you suddenly get that feeling, ‘Uh-oh, this is different now, and I’m not sure I like it any more.’

  Even the Dagnerrotype guys were doing selfies.

  What was making me crazy was the way every new idea that appeared would be instantly picked up by Madison Avenue – or Carson/Roberts, or anyone else thinking, ‘We could sell something with that’ – and turned into an ad. Who was the evil genius doing this? Why, there he was in the mirror.